


When You Spoke

by DeathInTheOrchard



Category: Dracula - Fandom, Hellsing
Genre: Psychological
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24241447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathInTheOrchard/pseuds/DeathInTheOrchard
Summary: During Abraham van Hellsing's time - Van Hellsing and Dr. Seward collaborate to study the recently captured and renamed Count Dracula. Dracula, in turn, seeks to make some use of the men who come to him.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	When You Spoke

Originally posted on FFN. Not sure how to format things easily on Ao3, so might be a little more difficult to read.  
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_Experimenting with this. I might need to rewrite it/parts of it after the second chapter, so if you notice any typos or things that don't read very well, please let me know! Trying to write and hoping posting will help._  
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They could feel his approach. With each clip of his heels striking the stones, the sound clattering against the walls of the tunnel-like corridors of the dungeon's depths, each footfall reverberated in their muscles, quivering – quivering and building into a maddening frenzy. The inmates let lose howls from their bellies, clawing and thrashing against the walls, or else shaking the bars of their iron doors in raging terror, well before they saw the man.

Two armed escorts strode alongside Dr. John Seward as he passed the first cell. Glancing inside with utter indifference, Seward saw a pale shape in rags huddled, shivering in a decrepit corner. The doctor passed swiftly on.

At the next door a maw of yellow fangs snarled, spittle flying like froth from its cracked, purple lips. The butt of a rifle flattened the already bruised nose, immediately subduing the growls and replacing them with whimpering snuffs, still beastlike in their pain.

The door to the Vampire Alucard's room would not hazard a window. It was solid sheet upon solid sheet of bolted iron. Even though the creature's power was sealed, it would not be permitted to infect the dilapidated minds of the lowly vermin Van Hellsing collected in his vivarium of dead things.

Dr. Seward waited for the door to be opened, standing with a seemingly imperturbable countenance. The tension he smothered inside himself was betrayed only by the incessant tapping of his finger against his elbow, which came as regularly as his heartbeat. The soldiers entered the cell before him and lighted the torches that stood in brackets on the walls. The torches crackled noisily in the relative quiet, mere echoes making their way from the other cells.

The vampire was enclosed within his coffin, but he would be expecting them. Van Hellsing had been to the cell with Dr. Seward during the day, at which time the vampire had been given specific instructions on how to comply with every aspect of Seward's sessions.

Despite his familiarity with the cell, this would be Seward's first time seeing the creature since it had been captured. And yet the doctor was not burdened by signs of hesitancy or doubt. Instead his face was animated and eager, and a little more flushed than usual.

"Come out," Seward commanded. "Let us sit together awhile."

A moment passed before the lid of the coffin clinked. It opened smoothly, like silk sweeping across silk, and the wooden lid was laid aside with care. A dark shadow flickering with torchlight was all that composed the creature that rose from the satin-lined interior. Then its white face turned to them. Dr. Seward's jaw clenched and his hands flexed momentarily, flashes of feeling, a battering of stormy memories striking him before falling away and leaving him just as steady as a mast.

The creature replaced the lid on the coffin and then sat elegantly upon it. More so from his manner than from the act itself, he had converted the coffin into a throne from whence he watched the men who had come to him. A bluish hue deadened his mouth and deepened the hollows of his cheeks and eyes, and wisps of grey snaked through his trailing mass of matted black hair. Despite this hungry and neglected state, a smile animated the demon's dead lips, as though to gall the men, as though to clearly state that appearances and circumstances were nothing to him.

And then he spoke in a low, reverberating voice, somehow lurid in its richness. "How does the evening find you, Dr. Seward?"

"It finds me well," Seward replied comfortably. He did not return the pleasantry immediately, but took a lantern from one of the men who had carried a few necessities into the dungeon for the doctor. No longer reliant on the torchlight, Seward wandered the cell, allowing himself to inspect the walls at his own leisure. There were shackles hanging from the wall and hooks for instruments, scuffed with use but otherwise clean of rust. The floor and walls were distinctly cleaner than those of the corridor. Without lowering the lantern or turning away from a limp coil of chains he had discovered, Seward asked, "How are you?"

All the question received was an uninterrupted gleam of demonic observation.

Seward turned one of the shackles about in the light. "How are you tonight?" he asked again.

Still nothing came in way of answer.

Seward's expression was strange, ill-suited to his features and alien to his character. This coarse incompatibility made his face appear lifeless, like a mask. He stared fixedly at the wall without seeing the stones, his unguarded back directed at the demon. "I am speaking to you, Alucard, so you should respond. How are you this evening?"

The creature grinned, his lips trembling against the pull of the magics that thrilled in his starved veins. His fingers trembled with ecstatic and undirected loathing, while the orders of his master rung in his head, and he answered with teeth that chattered, "I cannot speak of my state. I cannot complain." Resentment churned in the shifting and agitated expressions. But the heat ebbed as the creature refocused on the doctor, brought down from some detached plane of emotion by his presence.

"Do," Seward pivoted so suddenly that the demon's grin faltered, slipping into a watchful simper. Seward repeated, "Do speak. Do complain. You may say whatever you like while I am here."

The crisp, clinical smile Dr. Seward wore caused the demonic eyes to pulse, the pupils to thin and dilate with some inward vision as the dead lips parted but did not speak. The creature sighed, and the already chill cell cooled, roughening the flesh of the soldiers. "Ah," Alucard lingered a moment, and then a growl carried forth what was required. "Then, as you should have realized by now, as one for whom observation is at the basis of his profession, I am enslaved and entombed in a foreign land, by a mortal man who uses me as he sees fit and feeds me not. That is how I fair this evening, and for countless evenings that have passed, and countless still that have yet to come. These nights and their length cannot be quantified. What do you make of that, doctor?"

"So, you are hungry?" was all Seward said.

The vampire's tongue slowed, "Hungry…. Yes. Always hungry." He hummed, as though musing. But nothing more came.

Dr. Seward stepped towards the coffin. A chair that had been tucked under the arm of one of the soldiers was placed where Seward indicated. When Seward spoke to the man, the vampire heard a tone wholly unlike the one that was used to address himself as soon as the doctor was comfortably seated. He was like two men in one body. "Hunger – is that all you feel these days? That seems rather uncomplicated. If you were free and back in your own country, all you would do is eat your fill every night?"

The red eyes narrowed abruptly, and the ironical simper soured. Alucard's mouth suddenly twisted into a sliver of serrated fangs, while his eyes were as hateful as before, but now some of that ill-feeling was directed at the doctor. The demon's lips quivered. His chest filled, and his unambiguously inhuman eyes, devoid of a human guise, were little more than molten ire when words were finally torn from his throat. "Yes," the answer boomed in the cell and through the open door, causing the soldier that stood in the doorway and the one beside Seward to grip their weapons preemptively. Wicked humor broiled the voice, "Yes, I would feed, Doctor. I would feed on the young and the beautiful. I would reap a great harvest and fill my castle with the tenderer sex and toss their bloodless bodies onto the ramparts for the crow's feast, until my thirst was quenched. I would fly out like Nemesis, to cleanse the earth of the filth that dared trespass upon my land in my absence, having ascended from their lowly crypts from whence they had cowered for decades and lain like the dead."

The vampire was leaning towards Seward now, his head cocked, his hair sifting unnaturally in the stagnant air, and his hands gripping the lid of his coffin, heedless of his talons as they pressed into the wood. Fangs flashed brilliantly in the torchlight and his eyes glinted like crimson marbles while the air rumbled with the monster's promises, "I would take back my lands and my people. I would go where I wished, feed as I pleased. I would take what I wanted, give nothing, sacrifice nothing. Deny myself, nothing. Until I was again satiated. Then I would destroy this land- your land. I would watch it burn and your faithful Protestants shake their fists at the God who has forsaken them, and they would writhe in their bubbling oils at my feet. If I so wished... But I do not know what I would do. I do not know until my Hunger has been soothed…" The demon growled lowly in a different tone, blinking and intentionally looking to the torches to retract his pupils – unsure of what thoughts he had uttered, whether they had been true, and how they could have possibly been lies under the influence of the seal. And yet these words had sounded foreign in his ears.

Dr. Seward watched all of this, deeply contented. He in turn leaned forward, his elbow on his knee, his face resting comfortably in his hand. "Isn't it strange that you do not want to kill Abraham?"

The cell was silent. The beast sat unmoving. Then Alucard's lips curled back to unsheathe his daggered teeth in contempt. His tone was dangerously amiable and inviting, "Why do you say that?"

"You've spoken of this land and of 'Protestants', but not of Abraham. He isn't even a Protestant."

The vampire snorted, his posture relaxing and characteristically human, with signs of his deepening disdain for the so-called doctor. "That was to be… assumed," his brow jumped and evened as he gesticulated carelessly. "Van Hellsing must be dead in order for me to be free."

"No," Seward corrected in a voice that might have been comforting in another setting. "He must choose to free you, in order for you to be free. Killing him will do nothing. Killing his blood relatives will do nothing. You must kill every single human being on this planet before you'll have your freedom. And then you will only have a limited time to exist, before you shrivel up and descend into the earth.

"And you know this," Seward added pleasantly. He cloaked himself with an intimidating sociability, a dominating and derogatory kindness, as though he were showing some especially undeserving vermin compassion it could not refuse.

Alucard's expression twisted more than ever before, and the vampire moved with his agitation, rolling his neck, sighing and licking his lips like a wolf tasting its fangs. Eventually, once the irritation had passed, he resettled himself and positively purred, "Of course. I know this."

"Of course," Seward echoed, and Alucard stiffened for a moment. The vampire blinked like some great lizard, so quickly that the color of his irises never seemed to disappear. In the doctor's eyes, the creature was a positive chimera of human and animalistic traits. And Seward's unwavering confidence and ease seemed to bring the vampire into some undefined element, coaxing out new and exceptional behaviors that were distinguishable from those of the other vampires. They predictably reverted to beasts or cowering humans. Alucard became something else under the doctor's influence. This influence now brought Alucard's hands together, where they clasped expectantly. This old demon was waiting for Seward, having found for once in the man some glimmering curiosity, and at the next question the vampire's lips did not tremble with resistance.

Dr. Seward appeared to be perfectly comfortable, despite the chill of the cell. Something else kept his blood warm. "So, you do not wish to kill Abraham," Seward murmured.

First the vampire stared, and then he chuckled, "I am sorry to disappoint you, doctor. But I do want to kill him. Desperately."

"No. I know that, to the contrary, you would not kill Abraham. And I find that… curious, Alucard. I want to know why you did not remember Abraham when you spoke of laying waste to this land."

"I do not want to lay waste to this land," Alucard enunciated through his residual accent.

Seward's brow moved faintly. "Changed your mind already, Alucard? Why?"

Alucard blinked at every mention of his new name. "I don't… like… waste." The slyness in the voice and presiding smile had no effect whatsoever on the doctor.

Seward went on, "You would like to stretch your wings, though. You would like to vent your anger. You would like to appease your belly. You do not want to expend too much effort in a task that will not satisfy you. You want to feel satisfaction. You miss that feeling…" Seward waited before continuing. He had the demon's full attention and he would endeavor to keep it. "When was the last time you felt satisfaction, or something akin to satisfaction?"

Seward thought he knew why Alucard had not mentioned Abraham. The creature had been fixated on him, since Seward had been challenging him; Seward had been in the room with his back to the creature, insulting his instincts. Presumably angered, Alucard had only spoken to anger Seward in turn, but anger easily muddles a mind. And a muddled mind is much easier to redirect, as the individual finds themself in a fog - but not only that. The creature was already muddled by the seal, by Abraham's orders, by an external will that inhabited his mind and easily bludgeoned his own will into submission. These were the theories Dr. Seward proceeded to work with.

"That would have been the last time I was free," said Alucard.

"No," Seward said, and he looked the demon in the eye. "You've experienced satisfaction or contentment at some point since then. It has been many months, nearly two seasons… You might not understand the question."

The vampire's lips twitched.

Seward needed only a moment, "Alucard, focus on a feeling resembling satisfaction, attached to something you've encountered daily since your internment."

"Unlikely, for a being in my position," Alucard smiled.

"Even in your position." And then Seward asked suddenly, "Are you not satisfied with your coffin?"

Alucard' face fell. His resisted for a moment, and then consented, "So long as it is in my possession…"

"You are content when you are able to sleep through the day, or return to sleep when you are disturbed. Yes?"

Alucard had no choice but to give a verbal ascent, while wordlessly communicating his disagreement.

"So, and I will give you a moment or two to think, what besides your coffin makes you feel satisfied?"

Alucard skated rapidly through images and sensations stored up in his brain, coming to the surface slowly though, much more slowly than he was accustomed to. Dr. Seward observed him all the while, memorizing what the vampire looked like when he was truly considering a question.

"Feeding," Alucard murmured quietly, watching the man in turn. "Sleeping. Those are the two great joys of my life."

"Do you take any interest in what your master does with his time?"

There was an instinctual recoiling in the demon that Seward could not discern to have been physical – it had been some less definite impression.

"Oh?" Alucard's brow rose. "Am I to take interest in his doings? When he isn't butchering me, he's butchering some bastard creature down there." His head jerked towards the hall. "Or else he's away entirely."

"And you prefer when he is away?"

The quiet did not affirm the assumption, and Dr. Seward's smile altered. Seward ran his hand over his mouth thoughtfully.


End file.
